The Ballad of a Small Player (9 page)

EIGHT

I
went to a bar near the Landmark, and I set out to get myself into the calm neutrality of total intoxication achieved through Chinese brandy. The bar was called Jilted and there was a kind of shooting range at its far end where patrons could pin up images of their ex-lovers and throw beer glasses at them. A sobbing Russian girl was doing just that. I let the memory of Dao-Ming flood back into me and soon there was very little of that memory. Through the darkened windows the first glimmers of dawn were bouncing off the metallic sides of the streets, off the windows covered with stickers and the shutters of the computer stores, and the stale odor of all the spent nights seeped back into my head and made it ache. I wondered if I should go back to the hotel and get a shot of free vodka from the mini-bar that I hadn’t paid for, and on reflection that seemed like a pretty fine idea since the shots at Jilted were not the cheapest. There was nowhere else to go and I had the wild idea finally that I might collect my
things—as if I had
things—
and then go down to the ferry terminal and cross over to the Hong Kong side. No reason. Just because it was something to do.

When I got back to the Lisboa the receptionists didn’t even look up as I walked in, and I went up to my room unremarked upon. I stayed there for less than five minutes, collecting a few items, such as a wristwatch and a light raincoat, leaving my passport in the desk drawer where it had lain undisturbed for months. I closed the curtains and left the bathroom light on but extinguished the others. I stood for a moment in the center of the room and looked around this ridiculous habitat that I had made my own for so long, wondering if it were even possible now to simply walk out as if it were a stage prop that could be discarded. I turned and decided not to think about it. In my raincoat and suede shoes I went back down to the lobby, hoping I could pass out of the building as anonymously as I had just entered it. And indeed no one noticed me.

I walked to the terminal. A sullen crowd had already gathered for the first boat over and the men were smoking. The skies had grown overcast, and for a while it looked as if there might be a last-minute decision about whether to let the hydrofoil out into open sea. On the horizon the monsoons hovered. At six thirty we began to board, and I sat at the front of the craft among the old people wrapped up to the eyeballs as if it were the dead of a European winter, and off we set, the all-night low rollers and a few of the cleaning
staff and some confused tourists and Lord Doyle, rocking on ominous swells and swinging into view of the green mountains of the South China Sea, which are always as soft and definite as monuments carved out of jade.

I sat against the window and thought back over the sequences of my losses, struck by a sort of disbelief in them because they went, I thought, against the statistical law of odds. I had been duped, but there was no going back.

B
uddhists believe that the afterlife is divided into six realms. There is the realm of
devas
, or blissful gods; the realm of animals and that of humans; the domain of the
asura
demi-gods; and of
preta
, or hungry ghosts. Below them all lies the realm of
naraka
, or Hell.

Each realm reflects the actions of a previous life. People who are reborn as hungry ghosts were strongly acquisitive, driven by desire. Their insatiable needs are symbolized by their long necks and swollen bellies. Continually suffering from hunger and thirst, they cannot sate or slake either craving. They are supernatural beings and so their sufferings far exceed our own. Their hunger is a thousand times more intense than ours, and so is their thirst.

For the Chinese the realm of the hungry ghosts is similar to Hell in the Christian world. Its inhabitants have mouths the size of needle eyes, and stomachs as large as caves. Taoists believe that the hungry ghosts did not find
in life what they needed to survive. They are the ghosts of suicides and those who have suffered a violent death.

And they are awaiting reincarnation, like everyone else. “The Sutra on the Ghosts Questioning Mu-lien” describes a deceitful diviner being reborn as a hungry ghost for several lifetimes. During the seventh lunar month of the Chinese calendar, the hungry ghosts are let out of Hell and roam freely seeking food and entertainment, and the Hungry Ghost Festival welcomes them. The sacrificial altars house the bodhisattva Ksitigarbha, offering plates of rice flour cakes and peaches, and they say that it is what the hungry ghosts want to eat, as if mortals would know, when in reality they know nothing about the ghosts at all.

I was thinking of all this as I got up and walked to the front door of the hydrofoil and peered out into the rain as the boat listed slightly in the wind and the guards in their waterproof capes strained to catch the first sight of the skyscrapers. The looming crystals of capitalism that fill us with comfort and dread. I edged out onto the rails and slipped back to the rear of the craft, where there was a platform of some kind, and I hung on with wet hands scanning the diminishing mountains of the mainland, on which could be seen groups of white houses and snaking roads and little fields of sunflowers. This land that I always passed and never explored. A distant paradise called “China” that was reputed to be Hell on earth but was probably something in between. If I threw myself into the
sea right then, it was possible that my human instinct to survive would impel me to swim there and wash up on a beach, ready to be collected by the Red Army. Or perhaps I would have the inner force to keep myself under water.

As I stood there I must have wavered too long. The moment came and went, and as I was going black and vibrant inside, as I prepared to step off the platform and greet a long, rolling gunmetal wave that seemed to be following the hydrofoil, there was a blast of a foghorn and I was shaken back into normal consciousness. I turned my head and suddenly saw the steel and glass towers penetrating a mantle of stationary mist, a Wagnerian spectacle of pure horror that overwhelmed any petty thoughts of my own. It so surprised me that I stepped back from the precipice and caught my breath.

It was enough to spoil the opportunity, and then we were passing Sulphur Sound and it was too late; we were too close to the machinery of life.

T
he terminal was its usual self, a pandemonium of wild-eyed commuters, food, and tea. I walked out directly into the traffic in the rain and strode across Con-naught Road. I had no umbrella and soon I was soaked, struggling between the tower blocks of Wing Lok, the Hing Yip Center and the Tung Hip and the Mandarin Building on Bonham Strand. They all seemed familiar and
completely unknown at the same time, like things one has left behind in an abandoned room, having turned off the lights and closed the door weeks ago. And then one returns and everything is as it was. I walked miserably toward the Pemberton and the Kai Fung mansion, a fly stuck in a jam jar, and my mind did not—as was customary—race ahead of my body, but instead trailed far behind it. The familiar British names that always consoled: Wellington, Queen’s Road, Gough, Aberdeen, Cleverly. And so down in a quick bus ride to Wellington to Aberdeen and halfway down it the Sam La Lane playground, where a few unhappy brats were at it with their moist nannies, and farther on the street named, I assume, after Lord Elgin, thief of marbles. Elgin goes on and on and there is an Elgin Building and a building called the Elgin and the massive and brutal Sacred Heart Canossian at the end of it, where I used to buy an ice cream on hot nights and eat alone just because of the name. But the center of Elgin is the escalators that rise through the tenements and the tourist restaurants, none of them Chinese, making their way up the mountains toward railed platforms and the silent residential roads of the heights. The late-nighters gripping the moving handrails as they stare down into the alleys passing by. The feeling of fetes suspended and abandoned as people go home. I have always thought it is the best way to move through a city, on a moving beltway at the pace of a walker, everyone at the same speed and therefore never
bumping into one another. I dropped into Taku and sat at the sushi bar dithering, and then decided I couldn’t risk my last pennies on a shrimp roll. I just needed to clear my head, or drink, and I didn’t have enough money to drink for long. One cold Asahi tap at the bar. The serving girls stared at me. It must have been the shaking hand, the foam on the lip. I went all the way up the mountain on the escalators and soon it began to rain and when I looked down at the canyons of vertical neon and horizontal laundry I saw that the pavement shone and the crowds had departed for a while. The wider roads here were nearly empty, the red and white taxis crawling along them with their service lights on, and the serious middle classes scurrying with their plastic umbrellas, anxious to get back to their tower blocks. I could feel the sweaty closeness of the destroyed forests, the humid gardens framed with concrete and the whir of the air-conditioning units.

I got to the last “station” and stood there under the white lights watching the young couples come up the escalators hand in hand, wondering if once I had looked like that, thin and tensile, with a girl on my arm and a look of waspish affluence. Western boys and Asian girls, children of banks and insurance companies and press agencies, couples forged by a crossroads in history. They were aliens to me, another species altogether. I gripped the wet rail and let the rain spatter my face. The shakes came on again. Where did I go from there, suspended between sky
and water and laundry? The thought of suicide, invitingly voluptuous. I’d only have to slip over the railing and drop into the chasm where the pools of water were forming. Like tossing a paper airplane and letting gravity take over.

I walked back down on slippery steps. I found Hollywood Road and the bars were filled with Englishmen standing oblivious in the rain just as they do in London, beers in hand, mildly oafish and good-natured, but then I lost heart and I didn’t know what I was doing and I thought:
I have to get to Kowloon, I have to get over the bay to Kowloon and have tea at the Intercontinental that I can’t pay for, but I’ll find an excuse and they’ll let me off
. It would help me clear my head and calm down. So I turned and headed back to the water on the brink of paranoia. A thousand bucks won’t buy you tea and scones in Hong Kong.

Seabirds had scattered all over the buildings near the water, and the sky was almost black with the underbelly of a typhoon that was still hundreds of miles away. I rode over at rush hour. It was a short walk to Salisbury Road. The Intercontinental had long been my sanctuary of preference. After winning at Hong Kak in the old days I used to come here with Adrian Lipett and his girls and down their signature Dragon cocktails while that insufferable bore told us how the nine dragons of Kowloon were reputed to be able to pass silently through glass and therefore passed through the glass-walled Lobby Lounge on their way to
a dawn dip in Victoria Harbor. Happy times. The lounge was quiet now, the windows streaked with rain. The darkness of the day made the quietly lit tables intimate. I sat by the glass and ordered an Earl Grey with some toast, and then, getting bolder, a fresh-squeezed orange juice.

It was then that I realized how hungry I was after the night I had just spent. My eye strayed to a buffet that had just been opened for the hotel guests. It was extraordinarily expensive, but of course one never pays up front and so I decided it was worth the risk. As I was getting up, the waitress came over and asked if I would like a champagne orange juice to start my day (I looked a little crumpled but it was a suit all the same). I said without hesitation how nice that would be. It was folly but since I was gambling with the next hour and its events already, I thought that I might as well aim high. I went to the buffet and loaded up a plate with sushi, fresh clams, croissants, grapefruit, and a small dish of
oeufs Savoyards
. I took them back to the window and wolfed them down. I was ravenous. I went back for another load and on the way ordered a second champagne orange juice, then a third. I knew that the bill was mounting up, but I had suddenly ceased caring. As I ceased caring, I ceased calculating the margin by which I wouldn’t be able to pay. I ordered coffee and a brandy. It was now about nine o’clock and the lounge was half filled with men reading the Asian
Wall Street Journal
. The rain intensified. Gradually the harbor view began to disappear.
I went to the bathroom and washed my face. Where did I go from here? I was walled in with steel and glass, by propriety and by security personnel. My options were limited, to put it mildly. True, I could slip quietly away by walking confidently to the elevators and leaving a newspaper opened at the table, indicating that I wished to return. But there were uniformed staff around the elevators and that would probably not work. I could give a room number and sign the chit and hope that it would not be recognized. Asian hotels train their staff meticulously, however, no doubt with precisely these eventualities in mind. It was a calamitous risk. Alternatively, I could fake a heart attack in the middle of the room. That would work, up to a point. But the fakery would be easily exposed within the hour and the medical services would liaise with the hotel about the unpaid bill. Unwise. That left outright flight via a back door and exit stairs. Not classy, but effective. It was the one thing that might take them by surprise. As I walked back out to the lounge I tried to plan it all before I executed it, but my mind was fogged and I could not work out the details. A fourth champagne cocktail was waiting for me on the table, obscenely amicable, and instead of running for it I just sat and gulped it down. And I was still hungry. I ordered some blinis and caviar à la carte.

Caviar is more expensive in Hong King than anywhere on earth, except perhaps those joints in Moscow where foreigners cannot go. I saw the girl totting me up by
the bar, but a
gwai lo
is rarely second-guessed. When they arrived the next fizz was on the house.